Another colossal monument to Viktor Yanukovych’s vanity unveiled as hunt continues for ousted Ukrainian president

LAPSI, Ukraine — Ukrainians were stunned by the opulent grandeur of Viktor Yanukovych’s presidential palace when the doors were thrown open last Saturday, hours after the deposed leader fled for parts unknown before being formally charged with mass murder.

If those who gazed in wonder at the palace in Kyiv could have travelled to the Crimean Peninsula, they might have had an even bigger shock at what is being built on a remote mountainside.

Another grotesque monument to Mr. Yanukovych’s vanity and venality has been slowly rising for the past three years about 30 kilometres from Sevastopol. Or at least it had been, until workers began to cart away building materials Monday because, as several of them said, “nobody has told us anything, but we understand that everything is now frozen and we won’t get paid.”

A few Ukrainians and journalists were allowed into the massive work site Tuesday. What they saw was a villa so colossal that, at a guess, it was four or five times the size of the huge residence in Kyiv that provoked such disgust when the common folk were allowed inside to gawk.

A Russian website estimated the “cottage” by the sea was 8,000 square metres. It looked to be six months to a year from being completed. But it was already possible to see the basketball court-sized living room was about 20 metres high and included a massive fireplace.

Workers said none of the Yanukovyches visited, but they heard the same rumours as everyone else in Sevastopol about what was being built near Cape Aya — it was to be the principal home of the former president’s son.

“I am 100% sure that is Yanukovych’s. Nobody else would have been confident enough to build something like this,” said Dmitri Piltii who drove from Kyiv, where he had toured the presidential palace, with its zoo, private lake and full-scale mockup of a Spanish galleon.

Mr. Piltii had once camped and hiked around Cape Aya, which he said had been owned by a trolley bus company during Soviet times, but such visits were stopped several years ago.

Staggered by the immensity of the structure, the electronics store owner said it was as if “Yanukovych had escaped from prison yet continued to live by the laws of prison. I had expected it be grand. But not this grand.”

The mansion included a giant indoor swimming pool made to look like a Roman bath with a staircase into the water as well as magnificent columns and balustrades. And, of course, there were those other essentials, an octagon-shaped gazebo, a helicopter pad and an elevator.

One wing of the three-storey structure was said to be for the Yanukovych family. The other wing was to have been an art gallery looking out at a winter garden and the sea.

To make room for the copper-roofed villa, which is in the middle of an old-growth forest, groves of rare species of pine and juniper had been ripped out and a private road several hundred metres long cut into the mountain.

The man in whose honour this shrine was being erected is still on the lam. He surfaced in the northeastern mining region of Donetsk Saturday, before fleeing to the port of Balaclava Sunday.

Built around a tiny cove between cliffs riddled with tunnels and home to a top-secret Soviet-era submarine base, it could have been purpose-built as a bolthole for a villain on the run.

“First, he turned up at the military airport at Belbek [13 km north of Sevastopol]. They turned him away, so he drove down here. Then he was seen leaving sometime on Sunday evening,” said Roman Reitz, a fisherman.

Locals described how the Centurion, a 95-foot, cherry coloured yacht, left its moorings and headed south-east along the coast shortly before Mr. Yanukovych left by car — perhaps for a secret rendezvous with the vessel.

Now, the trail has gone stone-cold.

What Mr. Yanukovych has left in his wake is an acting administration that is so quarrelsome it will be at least Thursday before a new government can be announced. Meanwhile, tensions are rising in the predominantly ethnic Russian Crimea.

Protesters in Sevastopol said they wanted to reintegrate with Russia, of which the Crimea had been a part until 1954.

There were few Ukrainian flags in sight and the Russian flag flying everywhere. Outside city hall, near monuments to Sevastopol and the other 11 Soviet hero cities in the fight against the Nazis, one of several handmade signs screamed “Kyiv cannot give us orders,”

“We want to separate from Ukraine,” said Svetlana Pletneva. “We are Russian. We speak Russian. Sevastopol will always be a Russian city.

“We are being mocked by these people who made the revolution in Kyiv. This will not be tolerated. Mother Russia will take us eventually.”